The birds didn’t exactly fall silent on my home turf during the 2021 national backyard bird count. But on my home turf their songs and calls were drowned out by a substantial building development within sight and earshot of my garden.
The birds were still around, I think, but the sound of the warning bleeps of reversing concrete trucks and the hammering of nail guns made it an unfriendly environment.
So instead I took my notebook and binoculars a short distance away to a spot named Fantail Quarry close to the Waterworks Reserve.
The Aussie Backyard Bird Count was launched in 2014 and was originally intended to be a modest exercise in citizen science, encouraging the group’s 6000 members to record birds over a single week, with the results to be fed into a database of bird populations.
The initial interest surprised the organisers, as has the project’s phenomenal growth since its start. For the 2021 count, 106,707 bird lovers took part in the survey from October 18-24, logging nearly five million individual birds. The result was delayed until late last month to enable the sheer volume of data to be processed.
The lockdowns associated with the Covid-19 pandemic has spurred an unparalleled interest in all forms nature in our gardens, but even before the pandemic struck the count was already termed Australia’s biggest citizen-science project.
During the surveys participants monitor birds at a single location over a 20-minute period, with any number of counts being permitted during the week.
My own count numbered 30 mainly woodland birds in the wattles and gums surrounding Fantail Quarry which I duly entered in the database downloaded from the Birdlife Australia website.
The count is especially important for Tasmanians because it gives local bird-watchers a chance to celebrate the 12 bird species unique to the island state.
At Fantail Quarry I logged three of the species found nowhere else on earth – the green rosella, yellow wattlebird and yellow-throated honeyeater.
Although the survey is conducted across the country, the data gathered mainly applies to urban and suburban Australia, where most people live.
And in our more densely populated areas it is providing a valuable insight into bird population trends, revealing what birds are managing to survive in urban environments, and what species are not faring so well. Among the winners in Tasmania are the noisy miners and, on the mainland, rainbow lorikeets.
A worrying revelation in the counts has been the apparent decline of a favourite bird, the superb fairy-wren.
The blue wren, as it is known in Tasmania, may have won the earlier Bird of the Year contest in September but its numbers are giving cause for concern in all capital cities bar one – Hobart.
Perhaps it is time for an extra emblem to promote our city – Hobart, the blue-wren capital of Australia.